After the bombshell LucasFilm dropped on us this week – that they have parted company with the directors of the untitled Hans Solo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, over creative differences, talk has been rife amongst the film community surrounding past director and studio splits over the years with Edgar Wright taking the driver’s seat.

The most talked about from recent years is Baby Driver and Shaun of The Dead director Edgar Wright’s parting of company with Marvel after a divergence in vision for the Paul Rudd led Ant-Man. Whilst on a promotional tour for his latest musical heist caper, Wright joined Kristopher Tapley on Variety’s Playback Podcast and reflected on his Ant-Man exit with nothing but positivity while giving an insight into the creative differences that paved his exit.

“I think the most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie. It was a really heartbreaking decision to have to walk away after having worked on it for so long, because me and Joe Cornish in some form—it’s funny some people say, ‘Oh they’ve been working on it for eight years’ and that was somewhat true, but in that time I had made three movies so it wasn’t like I was working on it full time. But after The World’s End, I did work on it for like a year, I was gonna make the movie. But then I was the writer-director on it and then they wanted to do a draft without me and having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward thinking if I do one of these movies I would like to be the writer-director. Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”

Edgar Wright Ant-Man

After Edgar Wright left, Marvel brought in Peyton Reed to take up the director’s chair and asked Paul Rudd and Adam McKay to rewrite the script whilst still keeping hold of most of the cast Wright had brought in. Wright never looked back though, and although he was upset the departure gave him time to move on and create the film which is about to be released next week, Baby Driver.

“The good thing that came out of it is I got to kind of move on to [Baby Driver], which was a script that I had already written. And maybe one of the ironies about it is I had thought in the back of my head, ‘Well if the Marvel movie does well, maybe I’ll have enough muscle to get Baby Driver made,’ and so it’s ironic I guess that I didn’t make that movie and got Baby Driver made, and with a studio, which for an original movie is very rare. And the other important thing for me is almost the entirety of my crew who were gonna do that movie sort of left in solidarity, so it was really important to me to get another film going so I could kind of re-employ them all. So the funny thing about Baby Driver is it pretty much features all the [Heads of Department] who were gonna do the other movie with me.”

Ant-Man still proved to be somewhat of a hit amongst fans, but we can’t help wondering, with Wright at the helm if this could have been one hell of a different movie.